The jury has been sequestered for the night after beginning deliberations late Thursday in the murder trial for one Nunavut man accused of killing another.
Thirty-four-year-old Patrick Sulurayok is charged with second-degree murder in the death of 26-year-old Bernard Otuk on Roaches Line in 2021.
The trial has heard that the acccused restrained the victim for 5-10 minutes, after which he collapsed and died.
The restraint has been called a hold, a chokehold, grappling, wrestling and even child’s play, but it’s been deemed the cause of death, due to loss of blood flow to the brain.
Court has also been told that can take less than a minute, with prosecutor Tim O’Brien saying earlier Thursday that hold went on too long, eventually crossing the line from self-defence to murder.
And in a dramatic turn of events, and to illustrate his point, he timed-out five full minutes of silence in the courtroom, broken only by the sobbing of the victim’s mother.
It was part of his closing arguments before the jury.
Defence lawyers Bob Buckingham and Danny Vavasour with their client, Patrick Sulurayok, in Supreme Court. (VOCM News)
But defence lawyer Bob Buckingham, known for his own dramatics, called it all fiction and speculation, saying no one knows for sure what kind of hold it was, or how long the fatal pressure was applied.
Sulurayok and Otuk were from the same Nunavut community and were on leave from their fishing vessel docked in Bay Roberts at the time.
Otuk was drunk, annoying and aggressive but he wasn’t a threat to kill, said O’Brien, claiming that behaviour spurred an angry and frustrated Sulurayok to kill him.
Said Buckingham: “There’s not one iota of evidence that (my client) was angry or frustrated. It’s all suspicion and supposition.”
The jury has been sequestered at a hotel for the night and is scheduled to resume deliberations at Supreme Court on Friday morning, weather permitting.
